Overview

SPARK + REBEL is a modular, unisex, sustainable digital & physical fashion brand that empowers you to do more with less. The brand DNA is rooted in the idea of transition and transformation. Imagine a wardrobe with just a few high quality and durable items (a jacket, a skirt, pants) and matching unique accessories, or pins, that are wearable art. You can easily mix and match all these garments and create limitless looks showing your individuality and rebellious spirit, while saving you both time and money. As a Creative director, I’ve been shaping brand, design strategy and storytelling, managing website design process and social media.

The problems

The main inspiration behind SPARK + REBEL is the idea of helping fashion consumers arrive at a minimalist wardrobe they love and wear. Why do we think this is important?

The garment industry is one of the key drivers behind environmental degradation and modern slavery. In the world of fast fashion, it takes 2700 liters to produce one cotton t-shirt. That's enough for one person to drink for 2.5 years. Not only that - people who make our clothing, mostly women and children, do so in unfair work conditions in developing countries for as little as $1 a day. Fast fashion might seem cheap for consumers but carries a huge amount of hidden cost in terms of environmental impact and exploitation of the underprivileged population.

Another problem is the consumer’s love of new purchases, lack of basic styling knowledge, and the familiar “never good enough” story. Humanity consumes 60% more clothing now than we did 15 years ago, and we only keep these garments for half as long before throwing them in the trash. Why? Because the entire capitalist machine from manufacturing to advertising is fine tuned to entice us to buy things we don’t need, and resisting it is much easier said than done.

Design persona

Our market research started back in 2020, when we started working on Sparkpick, an educational blog to share ideas on how to best transition to a sustainable fashion lifestyle. As fashion curators working with many emerging and established eco-fashion brands, we’ve become very familiar with the best sustainability practices. We’ve also researched the main pain points of a typical consumer when it comes to shopping for fashion.

The emerging design persona was Joanna, a marketing professional in her late 20s who has been already supporting sustainability in some ways. Joanna would like to create a minimalist wardrobe and is open to experimentation, which includes digital fashion. We were hoping that customers like Joanna will appreciate the concept of transformable fashion that allows one to create a multi-functional wardrobe. We decided to “upcycle” design persona created for Sparkpick and use it for SPARK + REBEL as well.

Branding guide

Our brand is inspired by nature and sustainability, the Art for Change movement, rebellious spirit, transformation, the creative shiny worlds of Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Guo Pei, and beautifully embroidered Spencer jackets from Balmain. This has shaped the branding strategy guiding us through the typography and color decisions.

To create a luxurious yet minimalist look, we used black and white as the base colors, and we also introduced two hues of red to bring references with the revolutionary vibe and add some drama. Last but not least, we added a mid-saturated green color to bring up associations with nature, rebirth, and utilitarian fashion style that our brand DNA is based on. 

Striving for the most efficient and thus eco-friendly Web typography, we went for Verdana, a system font, intended to be used for smaller body text, that comes pre-installed on devices and thus requires zero server requests. Cormorant Garamond was incorporated as a high-impact non-system font used for accent elements and social media to bring more personality and align with the Sparkpick branding since these two brands are related.

UX/UI design

The goal of the first version of the website was to communicate what SPARK + REBEL is about, its value proposition, showcase products in the debut digital fashion collection on DressX, introduce the team, and describe sustainability practices. Striving for minimalism and clean look, we released the website with four main pages - Home, Sustainability, Digital fashion, and About us.

The Home page became a landing page for introducing garments in our debut Etsy collection and cross-linked to the Sustainability page.

The Digital fashion page is dedicated to our digital fashion collection on DressX. The main purpose of this page is to display our digital garments and link to DressX, as well as to educate our customers on how to wear digital fashion since it’s a relatively new phenomena.

Two other pages - “About us” and “Eco styling with Sparkpick” - introduce to the brand’s story and cross-link to Sparkpick as the brand’s blog.

Key insights

SPARK + REBEL has been a delight to work on ever since we started our first upcycled fashion explorations at Sparkpick back in 2020. Seeing it evolve from a small garage factory into something bigger and building the creative team makes me very happy as a Creative director.

The brand lives in the context of several very new markets - sustainable fashion, modular fashion, digital fashion - and this comes with a set of challenges. For our customers, transitioning to a more conscious fashion lifestyle requires a change in mindset and habits, and it takes time, effort and yes, money. Here in the US, sustainable fashion faces significant headwinds competing with cheap fast fashion, delivered by those ubiquitous Amazon trucks. At the same time, for me as a business owner, the cost of a garment sustainably produced in the US with fair wages, custom design, certified eco-friendly and vegan fabric makes the case for targeting the luxury segment, which unfortunately puts an upper limit on the impact we can have.

Every change takes time, and we strongly believe that one day all fashion will become sustainable and fast-fashion a thing of the past. Until then all of us fashion consumers have to know that we do have a voice in this transition to mindful consumption.